Profondo Rosso and the Persistence of Memory

Within Argento's Deep Red, there are two central conflicts taking place that drive the action of the film. The one is within the character of Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) and the other is between Marcus and Martha, the killer. Both conflicts are essentially conflicts of memory, Marcus trying to remember a briefly witnessed piece of evidence and Martha trying to ensure Marcus never remembers.

The first sequence in the film is preparation for the playing out of these themes. We see the substance of the memory that is at the heart of the film. A child watches as his father is murdered with a knife. Martha is the murderer and her son Carlo is the child; this memory will haunt and destroy them both.

Years later, a renowned psychic--1975 was the peak of Uri Gellar's fame, recall--is in Rome and is taking questions in an auditorium. Although we don't know it yet, Martha is in the audience. In the midst of the presentation, the psychic begins to pick up some powerful information from the mind of someone in the audience, she can't be sure who; she even acts out the murder before the audience.

This event serves to pull the submerged memory to the surface of Martha's mind. Not just for her own safety--although that is an issue--but to suppress the memory itself, Martha undertakes the murder the psychic and succeeds. There would be no further killing, as the memory has been destroyed, were Marcus Daly not a witness to the killing.

It so happens that Marcus is detained by his drunk fellow-pianist friend in the plaza, Carlo, the child from the opening sequence. Carlos, we learn, regularly douses himself in alcohol; this is his way of suppressing the memory. We learn he's a good pianist, but unable to apply his talents. So is the memory of the traumatic event acting on him.

As Carlo detains Marcus, Marcus finds himself in the gravitational pull of this memory, trapped between the two characters who share it, for he sees the psychic being murdered from the plaza. Running up to her apartment, he is convinced he has witnessed something important to the case. As he tells this to Carlo, Carlo drops some semi-coherent nuggets of wisdom about the importance of his memory.

By chance a reporter who arrives at the crime scene prints a story about Marcus being a witness to the crime. In effect what reporters do is transfer events as soon as they happen into a form that lasts, inserting them, as it were, into the collective memory of society. This information apparently falls into Martha's hands.

Thus is the stage set. Marcus now believes he has important information on the fringes of his memory that he must try and dig out. He does not simply decide to play the sleuth. He is obsessed. It is there in his memory and he must unveil it. Simultaneously, Martha is aware that Marcus has apparently seen something, and this brings her to the conclusion that the memory, her traumatic memory, is given the possibility of surfacing once again. Martha will thus try to kill Marcus, all the while Marcus shall be trying to get to the bottom of his suspicions by following a rather illogical trail of clues.

While we discover that what Marcus actually witnessed was Martha's face in a reflection, his investigations curiously lead him directly to the event of the trauma. He first speaks to the parapsychologists who were involved with the psychic, gathering as much as he can about what the psychic witnessed, and later about a tune he hears and believes is played by the killer. The seemingly useless information leads him to a book of urban legends. This book contains a picture of a house. Through botanical data, he discovers exactly where this house is and investigates. Inside the house, he discovers first a painting of the murder and later the body of the murdered man. In so doing, he has uncovered the memory itself in it's purest form: the very residue of the traumatic event.

In the meanwhile, Martha stalks Marcus and murders each person he pumps for information. What is significant is that she murders each person is a ritualistic fashion. She first looks over a set of toys arranged on a surface, as she suits up for the murder. She later plays a doggerel tune on a record player within the hearing of the victim before she strikes. The toys and the song are linked to the opening sequence of the first murder. These rituals, then, return her to the traumatic event, so that by murdering all those she deems as having some connection to its unearthing, she is effectively murdering the memory itself.

There is, moreover, a certain cosmic memory in the film with a dark sense of irony. Each murder is foreshadowed by an innocuous event earlier in the film. At one point Marcus is scalded by steam from an expresso machine; later the author of the book of urban legends is later killed in a tub of boiling water. Marcus claims playing piano is symbolic of bashing his father's teeth in; the parapsychologist has his teeth bashed against a corner. It is as though some karmic force were remembering events relating to Marcus during his investigation into the memory, and unleashing them with vindictive force during Martha's attempts to purge the memory.

When Marcus is finally brought to the final point that connects the information he has discovered to a name, he is assaulted by Carlo. Now out of his drunken stupor, Carlo makes a more valiant effort at destroying the traumatic memory, but ultimately fails. However, Carlo's sacrifice is not without effect; the investigation seems to be off.

At just this time, the memory at the fringe of Marcus' brain comes back to him and he returns to the psychic's apartment. He remembers it was Martha's face he saw in a mirror. At that moment, Martha arrives to finish Marcus off and Martha is decapitated instead. Our last image is Marcus' face reflected in a pool of Martha's blood.

This ending is the triumph of memory. As I noted of the reporter earlier, we live in an era of Archive Fever. Everything is recorded, stored away--like the drawings with Carlo's name Marcus discovers--and seemingly indestructible. It is databased and cross-referenced. Photographs snap events into externalized memories; video cameras ensure no performance is lost.

Prior to the invention of writing, scholars like Walter Ong argue that information was at the service of the present. Imagine a king divides his kingdom between four sons, for instance. Oral historians will tell stories of the four sons of the king. But if one of the sons dies and his kingdom is absorbed by another, historians will tell stories of the three sons of the king. There will be no memory retained of the fourth son, as knowledge of his existence has no practical value. Today knowledge is valued for its own sake and we can indulge this luxury due to writing, printing, and now computer technology.

Deep Red illustrates these themes. In Deep Red it proves to be a futile effort to destroy memory altogether, and ultimately a destructive one. However, the hero is he who is obsessed with the recovery of memory; the truly Modern Soul, Marcus cannot resist discovering and archiving the memory, the knowledge for its own sake. And his romantic companion, the reporter, is sure to record and archive the memory for posterity.